


Comparative Pest Control Methodology

by adi_rotynd



Category: Captain America (Movies), Community (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (Or Not All That Ambiguous), Comic-Book Style Shenanigans, Multi, Pigeons, Sam Wilson-centric, ambiguous polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:37:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13556067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adi_rotynd/pseuds/adi_rotynd
Summary: Sam Wilson joins a totally normal, totally sensible pigeon club. (The Greendale Seven beg to differ.) This hobby is none of the other Avengers's business. (Steve, Bucky, and Natasha beg to differ.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [matchsticks_p (matchsticks)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/gifts).



> **Warnings:** 1) Cruelty to alien bugs for a couple chapters. 2) Various and sundry _Community_ character flaws like ableism and homophobia, treated lightly. 
> 
> This fic screamingly, _glaringly_ obviously has a whole lot to do with [matchsticks_p's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p) [Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4683341), right down to the pigeons. I even tried to use starlings here just to give that fic some breathing room, but the #thematics prevailed. I am confident that she, my Sammate, my partner in life and crime, isn't going to hold it against me. 
> 
> This also plays fast and loose with Daniel Haag-Wackernagel's experiment in [controlling pigeon populations](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/09/science/science-watch-basel-solves-problem-of-too-many-pigeons.html), which I read about in Courtney Humphries's excellent [Superdove](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3335602). 
> 
> [on tumblr](http://adirotynd.tumblr.com/post/171027199905/comparative-pest-control-methodology-chapter-1)
> 
> Enjoy, and comment should it strike your fancy!

“Stuff came for you while we were gone,” Bucky said, and he dropped a stack of mail into Sam’s lap. Actually—judging by the spluttering; Sam couldn’t be bothered to go to the enormous effort of opening his eyes to check—he dropped them on Steve’s face. Steve had sacked out with his head in Sam’s lap, so it amounted to the same thing. 

“Thanks,” Sam said. He didn’t lift his head from the back of the couch. He ached in twelve places and counting, he needed a shower, and he hadn’t sat on his own couch in a week. A week he’d spent in honest-to-god Transylvania shooting at gut-sucking alien bugs and listening to Doctor Doom deliver long speeches and longer maniacal fits of laughter. On the list of things he was willing to deal with, credit card offers were dead last and phone bills didn’t even appear. 

Bucky kept looming, a huge dark blotch against the sunshine-yellow behind Sam’s eyelids. “It looks important.”

“Opening other people’s mail is a federal offence,” Sam said, but forced his head up, because Bucky didn’t count bills of any kind as important. 

“So’s assassination,” Steve said into Sam’s belt. “The list just keeps growing, Buck. Looks real grim.” 

“Lucky Fury likes me better. If he had to let one of us go to jail, it’d be you.” 

Sam rubbed the gunk from his eyes, hoping it was mostly sleep rather than alien bug jelly, and squinted at the letters in his lap. They were all open; Sam hadn’t opened an envelope on his own since Bucky had appointed himself anthrax-and-razor-blade checker. Sam flipped through the pile, but nothing stood out. “I give up.” 

Bucky wedged a knee between Sam’s, leaning only technically on the couch and not Steve’s head. Steve swore. “You got something from your bird club,” Bucky said casually, and caught Sam in a kiss. 

Sam was so tired Steve’s face in his lap hadn’t gotten him bothered, so the kiss was a little overheated as far as he was concerned. He kissed back, slowly, and then put a hand on Bucky’s jaw and eased him back some. “Yeah?” he said when he got the chance. “What about it?”

“There’s a party.” Bucky slid a finger into the stack and pressed one envelope into his hand, fanning the others over his lap and into Steve’s face.

“God damnit—” Steve sat up, breaking between them and knocking his head against Bucky’s chin. 

“The invitation,” Bucky said, nursing what couldn’t possibly be a bruised lip, “says plus one.” 

“Who’s going to a party?” Natasha was already toweling her hair dry. Sam hadn’t blamed her for showering instantly rather than dropping where she stood, because one of the bugs had gotten its tentacles in her hair before it died, but that she hadn’t at least lingered under the hot water once she was there—that was some freaky assassin shit. 

“Sam is,” Steve said. “Plus one. Probably someone who’ll make a good impression. Whoever looks best in a suit. Maybe the one more used to public appearances.” 

“Oh no,” Sam said. “No. Don’t you two start.” 

“I just don’t want you to do something you’ll regret,” Bucky said. “Like take a guy who thinks going to a local birdwatching group potluck is a ‘public appearance.’ He’d go up to the buffet line and try to sign autographs. Goddamn disaster.”

Steve flushed only faintly. “By public appearances you know I fucking mean talking to people who aren’t Avengers or extraterrestrial killer bugs, and maybe not even Avengers. You asked Vision if he wanted to swap arms.” 

“I don’t expect you to understand cyborg humor,” Bucky said airily. “He got it.”

“He didn’t look like he got it.” Sam let his head drop against the couch again, fighting to keep his eyes open. “You’re lucky he didn’t actually do it. I bet he could.” The real problem with Natasha being out of the shower was it meant he should go get in, and he’d hoped to fall asleep before he had to face that. 

“He never looks like he gets anything.” Natasha tipped over the arm of a chair and curled up. “He does, though. Sometimes.” 

Bucky sighed and shook his head. “Steve wouldn’t know, since he’s not open to experiences outside his own.” 

“I’m not taking either of you,” Sam said. “These people don’t deserve to have you visited upon their innocent heads. I’m going to remind you of a fine June day last year when I tried to buy myself an ice cream cone from a food truck, a social interaction I had never in my life managed to fuck up—” 

“It was a ripoff,” Bucky said. “I stand by that. It was robbery. They pay twenty bucks for a three-gallon jug and charge you five dollars for four ounces. I was looking out for you.” 

“It’s an experience! I was buying a nostalgic experience!” 

Steve’s flush deepened. “He offered me a lifetime supply of free ice cream cones! I don’t have a graceful response prepared for that.”

Sam groaned. “Well, ‘I’m allergic to ice cream’ wasn’t a good place to start, because every person in this country knows you don’t have allergies anymore.” 

“Most people mess up ordering ice cream at some point.” Natasha stretched her leg across the gap between the chair and the couch and rested her heel on his arm, rolling it back and forth. “If I wanted a believable cover, I’d spill my change all over, or say ‘you too’ when they told me to enjoy my ice cream and look more embarrassed than that calls for. You have uncommon innate social grace, Sam.” 

Sam had heard his sister, at age thirteen, tell a friend to keep a dress because she looked better in it. She’d used that same tone of voice. “Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t actually mean I’ve never had an awkward interaction with a cashier, but okay. This is still why none of you is coming with me to this party. It’s a normal occasion, and I’m going to go be normal there.” 

Bucky screwed up his face. “It’d be normal to go with someone when the invite says to.” 

“It’s a nature club, and it’s not even a fun event like a hike.” Sam slid down the couch and rested his head on the arm, reaching up to squeeze Natasha’s ankle. “The other people on the invite list are bribing someone right now to go be bored with them for an hour.” 

Steve looked interested. “If you’d rather bribe us…” 

“We’re open to bribery,” Bucky said at the same time. 

“What nature club is this, anyway?” Natasha threw her balled-up towel at Bucky’s head. “I don’t know about a nature club.” Bucky caught the towel, which had likely been Natasha’s plan, as now he was responsible for hanging it up. 

“That’s because I can’t talk about it in front of them.” Sam gave up and let his eyes close. Dr. Cho had cleared them to leave the tower, so a quick nap with intergalactic ooze under his fingernails wasn’t going to kill him. Probably. “It’s just… We’re doing some grunt work for the university, and I got them an in with Stark Tower. We’re relocating some damn pigeons, all right? It’s not glamorous. If anyone mentions this to T’Challa, I’m going to poison their pancakes some morning.” 

“That was fast. It’s a local group? We’ve only lived in Manhattan for… what is it now, three months? Minus however much time you’re not here because we’re flying to all corners of the world.” 

“Abed’s in it too.” Sam tried to say this with a finality that might suggest Abed had been so struck by the whole gun-in-his-face deal that he’d looked Sam up years after SHIELD fell and invited him to join a club. In fact, Sam had joined first, but… 

“If _Abed_ gets to join,” Bucky started, as if on cue. 

“I didn’t _let_ Abed join. I’m not dating Abed.” 

“It does sort of undercut your point about it being a totally normal organization,” Steve said, in an insufferably reasonable tone. “Abed’s ex-SHIELD. I’m ex-SHIELD.” There was a muffled thud and an indignant grunt. Bucky, Sam guessed, had thrown the towel at Steve. 

“Fuck off,” Sam said. He rubbed the arch of Natasha’s foot. “It’s normal. Abed’s an exception to the rule. You’re both weird, and you better get on your best behavior if you want me to take one of you.” He swung his legs up on the couch, wondering whether bug ooze stained upholstery. “Gonna embarrass me in front of those nice people,” he muttered, or thought he did, before he dropped off to sleep. 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

The pigeon project membership had taken a nosedive, and Sam blamed the room where they met weekly to draw up the schedule. He also blamed scraping pigeon shit off the floor of a dovecote in subzero winds, but this meeting room was the real morale killer. The persistent smell of slightly-off casserole wafting from the splintered pressboard table. The interrogation-room mirror along one wall. The ceiling pocked with sickly, buzzing fluorescent lights. It did make him eager to get out in those subzero winds, though. It had that going for it. 

“So, you want me to put you down as a party of four? Five?” Abed said, materializing at Sam’s elbow with a clipboard. It wasn’t the clipboard he’d been holding earlier. 

“No,” Sam said. “Seriously, don’t, because they’ll know. I don’t know how, but they will. In fact, I might be a party of one. How long do I have to answer?” 

Abed sighed deeply and clicked his pen, which he kept poised over his clipboard. “As long as you want,” he said. He sounded genuine. He continued to stand there with his pen ready and his eyes fixed on Sam. 

Sam squinted back, then gave up. “If that’s sarcasm or passive aggression or something, man, you’re gonna have to tell me.” 

“Of course it’s not!” Shirley materialized, beaming, at his other elbow. Sam had been accused several times in his adult life of hypervigilance. He was starting to feel hypovigilant. He could have sworn Shirley was across the room, putting out snacks. She had Abed’s other clipboard in her hand, the one for counting the pigeons using the dovecote, and she switched it out. She tucked the party-planning clipboard under her arm. “None of us want to pressure you, Sam,” she said, setting the words out like individual candies in a display. “You take your time.” She locked her gaze on Abed and her voice dropped a full two octaves. “We wouldn’t want you to stop coming to the group like poor Daniel.” 

“Poor Daniel?” Sam repeated. “Something happen to him?”

“Oh no,” she cooed. “We just feel bad that he’s not enjoying our company.” Com-pa-ny, every syllable another candy on the tray.

“I don’t.” Abed clicked his pen. “He tried to fist-bump me on multiple occasions. It made me uncomfortable.” He took his other clipboard back from Shirley. “He also wore t-shirts with crude symbols on the chest and claimed it was ironic, and—” he narrowed his eyes at the clipboard—“‘gooped his hair up like 2001 never left.’” 

“Some of us are sorrier than others,” Shirley conceded. 

Abed’s head tilted. “He wore t-shirts with crude symbols on the chest,” he repeated, waving the clipboard. 

“I remember the t-shirts, Abed.” Shirley smiled with her teeth set. “I’ll have to take that poor boy a plate of cookies and tell him how much we miss him and how sorry we are that he’s never coming back, even though we understand he has other commitments.” Sam had once witnessed his dad excommunicate a man with a slice of mom’s homemade cherry pie. He tried not to openly tear up. 

For someone who didn’t, that Sam had noticed, make a habit of… facial expressions… Abed went through quite a number of small ones, then shook his head and turned to Sam. “You’re with Shirley today,” he said. “It’s her turn.”

Sam grinned at her. “I’d love that.” 

“Oh, yay!” She shook her fists in the air by her glowing face. Sam mentally rehearsed his proposal. 

“Thank you both for showing up in time to receive your assignments.” Abed put his pigeon clipboard back on top. “I don’t blame Britta and Annie for being late. They agreed that seeing themselves in the mirror under this light is like being visited by the ghosts of drunkard smoker aunts.” 

Shirley shook her head sadly. “It’s true. White complexions are so brittle. Hit them with a fluorescent overhead and they crack like eggshells a week after Easter.” 

“So that’s Britta and Annie,” Sam said. “What about everybody else?” 

“We got rid of Daniel.” Abed shrugged, a remarkably pointy gesture. “We’re down to Lenore and Chad. I wouldn’t worry about—”

The door swung open and hit the wall. It always hit the wall, which was speckled in smeary gray depressions. A black guy around their age walked in lugging a gym bag. He was followed by a white guy who looked a little older and had his nose in his phone in order to text, and a really old white guy who had his nose in his phone in order to yell at it. 

“Membership just went back up.” Abed’s smile was also remarkably pointy. 

The black guy looked around the room with an expression of abject horror. “I brought Inspector Spacetime gear for this? You said it would look like Sherlock Holmes’s study! You said I could hold a taxidermied bird and wear a monocle!” 

Abed twitched a finger. “I said that before I saw the upgrade fee. Sacrifices had to be made in the name of the budget.” Shirley gave him an encouraging nod. “It’s something I’m trying.” 

“I was going to name my stuffed flamingo Mr. Pebbles!” He sounded on the verge of tears. Then he spotted Sam and slid into an artful slouch. “’Sup,” he said. “Superhero, huh? I used to be a pretty big deal on my high school football team, so…” He spread his hands, point made. The bag’s strap lost its purchase on his shoulder and crashed into his elbow. 

“This is Troy.” Abed sounded proud. 

“Wow,” Sam said, as politely as he could. 

_“Turn right,”_ said the old guy’s phone. _“Turn right. Turn right.”_

“We’re there!” the old guy shouted. “Stop it! Close program! Read texts! Open voicemail! Close maps!”

 _“5 unread messages,”_ said the phone. 

The other white guy grabbed the phone. “Voiceover off,” he said. “Pierce, no one wants to hear what the Twitter robots are sexting you.” 

_“Voiceover off,”_ the phone agreed. 

“@Staci6969 isn’t the one who called me at four a.m. crying because her Instagram selfie only had 12 likes, and I won’t have you casting aspersions on her humanity just because of her learning disability!” He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Especially in front of Abed.” 

“She can’t spell because her brain is a code that regurgitates words from PornHub comments in roughly grammatical order, not because she has a learning disability—” He raised his head and saw the mirror. He was as stricken as Troy had been. “Dear God.” He cringed from the light in a posture Sam had previously seen only in vampire movies. “I look like my drunkard smoker uncle. I can’t be here.” 

“Sorry,” Sam said, “you guys all know each other already?”

“This is Pierce,” said Abed. “This is Jeff. This is Troy.” Troy merited not only a repeat but a sweeping hand gesture. “Everyone, this is Sam.”

Pierce looked disappointed. “You don’t always wear the little outfit with the wings?” 

“Why don’t you and I just head up to the roof,” Shirley said quietly. 

“That sounds good.” Sam offered her his arm. She twittered out a giggle and took it. 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Sam could see why the university had chosen this building’s rooftop. It made for great photos on the website, with the labyrinth of the rooftop container garden winding through the thicket of gothic spires. The pretentious old-fashioned dovecote looked right at home, a faux cottage for the engineered undergrowth and pine-green copper towers. 

The photos for the website had been taken in the summer. 

Sam leaned into the repurposed hoe and scraped the last of the guano through a gap in the floorboards. It was apparently being collected in a compartment under the floor, for curing and use as manure in the garden. That sounded neat in the abstract, but currently Sam didn’t give a shit about fully integrated community projects. He wanted to know how it was he’d made it this far in life without learning to wear a scarf when someone suggested it. 

_I would have if it hadn’t been Bucky,_ he told himself. It was hard to take Bucky’s advice seriously. Bucky regularly advised him to drop Steve on enemy combatants. To be fair, Steve also regularly advised Sam to drop him on enemy combatants. 

“Oh, _Sam_.” Shirley’s voice was hushed. “Look, they made it.” 

Sam leaned over her shoulder. The dovecote was mostly empty still, what pigeons they’d acquired out foraging, but here and there a few cooed in their nestbox-for-two apartments. From beneath the bird Shirley was aiming her camera at, two gnarled, dodo-looking beaks poked out. 

“Little miracles,” she said solemnly, taking a picture. The pigeon sat up straighter, fluttering its wings before it settled back down. “Ugh. Miracles that look like mole rats with craft-store fur glued on them, but they still win my bet against my boys.” Her face scrunched with pride the way it did whenever her sons came up. “They have to come help out on weekends now.” Her eyes narrowed with remembered pique. “They bet we couldn’t get these little streetrats to raise families but not on my watch are these pigeons going to live in sin. They’ve been joined together and they will produce progeny. I told them what you said about the chicks, that once babies grow up here the project is for keeps because they’ll imprint on the place like Jacob on Renesmee.” 

“Yeah…” Sam bent forward, hands on his knees. The bird jerked its head back and forth to inspect them with alternating eyes. “Not too sure about that last part, and they’re not as dead set on it as homing pigeons, but let’s say yes. They made it eight days, so we’re stuck with them now. Do we have the banding stuff up here?” 

Shirley broke out her clipboard and a plastic bag. “I’m ready to record but I’m not laying my hands on those goblins.” 

“It’s not that bad,” Sam laughed. He dipped a hand under the pigeon, which was a hot and sticky experience. It flapped, but let him pick it up before it took off in a flurry of thumping wings and offended clucks, circling the room. Shirley screamed, was the impression Sam got, but then he looked over his shoulder and found Shirley blinking patiently while Troy clutched his chest, spine rigid and gaze fixed straight ahead. 

“Okay,” Sam said, not laughing now, although only through sheer willpower. “You want to hold one of the—uh, the babies, so I can band it?” 

Troy shook himself out of his trance and considered. Direly serious, he asked, “Is the mom going to come back and peck my eyes out?” 

“Oh, sweetie, that was the dad,” Shirley said. “The man takes care of his babies all day.” Her eyebrows went flat. “I’ll tell you right now he doesn’t give his woman any lip about it, either. He knows she works just as hard outside the home as he does, and sometimes she needs a day to herself.” 

Troy nodded. “Okay.” He looked between them. “So… which one’s going to peck my eyes out?” 

“Nobody’s gonna peck your eyes out.” Sam gave up and laughed again, just a little bit. “Gimme your hands.” 

Troy held his hands out palm up and Catholic-school flat, eyes squeezed shut. 

“That’s a start.” Sam curled Troy’s fingers up and back down to loosen them up and cupped his under them until Troy had more of a cradle and less of a diving board. He scooped one of the squabs out of the nest just before the dad circled back in for a landing. He held it a second, brand-new pins and quills scratching his palms. Since he last saw it, it had tripled in size, opened its eyes, and gone gray where it had been pink, but it was still all beak and heartbeat. He shook his head and put it in Troy’s hands. “You hanging in there, man?” 

“That’s a whole life in my hands.” Troy didn’t open his eyes or move his lips. “I’m a god right now. It’s too much responsibility. I’m going to pass out.” 

“You’re not gonna pass out.” Sam threaded the squab’s fleshy leg back through two of Troy’s fingers and pointed its toes, three foreword and one back. 

“It’s trying to eat me.” 

“I got good news for you, then, ’cause it can’t.” He slipped the band on to the knuckle, did some wiggling, and popped the last toe through. 

“You’re very handy with those.” Shirley jotted down band and nestbox numbers. “You do much of this in the superhero business?” 

Sam snorted. “Just the Wilson business. My dad didn’t believe in pointless hobbies. If I was gonna birdwatch, I was going to volunteer for the BBL wherever we were staying that year. This is different, with babies, but...” He took the squab back and held it for a second, feeling the hum of blood and heave of breath. It flopped its head against his thumbs and growled, eyes bright, digging its beak along the lines of his hand and nibbling. It was hungry, and that was it. Not a care in the world aside from food. “Ready for the next one?” 

Troy kept his eyes closed, but also kept his hands out. “If I die from pigeon attack, tell Abed ‘I know.’ He’ll understand.”

“Everybody understands, man, that’s not an obscure reference.” Sam handed the other squab off. 

Troy squinted his left eye, just enough to peek down at it. “How long does it take them to grow up?” 

“Uh, maybe a month before they can fly? Seven or eight before they’re really mature, I think. Why?” 

“I’m gonna see this grow up.” Troy sounded dazed. “I’ll see its babies. I’m going to be a _grandfather_. This really is for good. God, I wanted to enjoy my freedom for a few more years. I’m too young for this.” 

“Yeah? I’m not, I’ll take them weekends so you can live it up.” Sam slipped the tag on, gentle with the soft little stub of a leg. “I knew what I was signing up for.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bird Banding Laboratory doesn't actually take junior volunteers, or even issue permits to people under 18, but... superheroes. And while it's an international effort, it's North American; in chapter four it'll turn out Sam's implied he's done this in countries where the BBL doesn't actively band birds. He meant it was coordinating with local efforts, in those cases, okay? (Superheroes!)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes an addition Bucky/Sam debt to [matchstick_p's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p) [A Dangerous Lifestyle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8097463/).

Within the week, they were headed back to Romania to deal with the exact same problem again. It was a seven-hour time difference. Sam was good at shaking jet lag, but it was the principle of the thing. 

He watched the sun’s sullen rise through the window of the jet as they chased it back up over the horizon. “Does anyone else feel a little embarrassed to show their face? Just a little. As the group of superheroes coming back because they failed to do an exterminator’s job.” 

Steve shifted in his seat. “Come on, Sam. We defeated Doctor Doom. That was a pretty good day’s work. We just didn’t get every single one of his… pets.”

“They’re not pets,” said Bucky. “I have a healthy respect for bugs. They’re a worthy opponent.” 

“Hey, yeah,” said Scott. “That’s cool to hear from—”

“The loudest animal relative to its size is the lesser waterboatman,” Bucky announced. “It’s eight hundredths of an inch long and it’s as loud as a freight train. It makes the noise with its dick.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Buck,” Steve groaned. 

“Excuse me, with its penis.” 

Scott looked like Bucky had gone in for a hug and then slapped him, and possibly insulted his mother. Wanda buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking. 

Sam pressed the back of his skull against the window and took a moment to thank Stark Industries for the immobility of the glass. He didn’t need his head rattled any in that moment. “Why… the hell… did we need to hear that.” 

Bucky shrugged. “It’s a fact. Might come in handy.” 

“Might it?” Wanda managed, strangled. 

“It _might_.” Bucky glared. “I picked up a lot of stuff because of that, traveling the world.” He eased back in his seat now he had the conversation on track, gaze sliding sideways to Sam. “You can’t tell before a mission what’ll be relevant. So I just learned all of it.” 

Sam thought he shouldn’t encourage this. He failed not to ask, “So did you ever wait until a lesser waterboatman… did its thing… and use that as cover for shooting some dude, or what?”

“Well. Most of the sound is lost before it gets to the human ear, because the bugs are underwater.” 

“And they’ve got them in England.” Scott turned his phone toward Sam. The search screen did mention the UK, Sam saw before Scott turned it back again to brood over it some more. “Am I the only one who was picturing someplace more exotic?” 

“I was picturing nothing at all,” Wanda said, very primly considering she was still red with suppressed laughter. “Not any of the bug sex.”

“It’s not _sex_ ,” Bucky said. “It’s like crickets. With their dicks instead of their wings. Bees, though—”

“New rule,” said Steve. “No talking about bug sex on the jet.” 

“Bees what?” said Scott, voice filled with dread. 

“No, I’m with Steve,” Sam said. “We’ve been talking about bug dick for at least three minutes, and one percent is as much flight time as I’m willing to spend on that topic.”

“I guess there’s a time and a place,” Bucky allowed. 

Sam stared at him. “Hell…” 

Bucky’s smile was always a little strange to witness, sweet and slow to cross his face like it had all the time in the world to waste, then gone the instant it got there. “I don’t think it’d be right for you to deprive your whole club of my experience with worldwide wildlife just because you’re a little squeamish about bug dick,” he said. 

“When I join a club dedicated to British entomology, I’ll call you first thing.” Sam felt this was more of a response than the entire conversation merited. He’d gone above and beyond right there, and it was over. He could have paid more attention to the thwarted jut of Steve’s jaw, maybe. After they’d squashed another couple hundred space-bomb bugs and dragged themselves to the café in Cluj-Napoca that made the lángos they all liked, Steve loudly referred to a flock of birds in the park across the street as a “museum of waxwings, _Bombycilla garrulus_ ,” and definitely he could have paid more attention to that. 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

They didn’t meet in the drop-ceilinged hell basement next week. Abed texted Sam a new room number. Then Shirley texted Sam the new room number, along with a picture of the tray of brownies she’d made for the meeting. Then Britta texted a link to a story about pigeons getting poached off the streets of Manhattan, and an animated Bat Signal. Then Pierce Hawthorne texted him _Don’t open anything Jeff sends you hes gay it will be a picture of his penis_. Then Troy texted a photo of himself sitting on the Iron Throne dressed as Han Solo. Then Troy texted him _I’m so sorry. please delete that. wrong number. please._

Sam told himself these were normal, unalarming interactions, but he was pretty sure he’d gotten those exact last two texts from Tony Stark a year or so back. 

Sam got to the third floor of the building he’d been traipsing through for a month and instantly got lost. The basement and the roof made sense, but the middle floors were composed of apparently infinite identical mahogany-and-maroon hallways. The carpeting and paneled walls swallowed his footsteps and the jingle of his keys. He smelled dust and teak and couldn’t hear a goddamn thing. Abed had said room #3187, but the doors weren’t numbered. Sam sighed, pulled out his phone, and called him. 

Abed popped out from behind a door down the hall. He had a bowler hat on his head and a red bandana knotted around his neck, which Sam could accept; he was also wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, which Sam had a harder time with. “Am I overdressed?” Sam said, and then, taking a closer look at the hat, “Am I _under_ dressed?” 

Abed looked him over minutely, like this called for an earnest evaluation. His nod was decisive. “You’ll do,” he said. “Troy and I are finished anyway. If you come early next week you can wear more silver spandex.”

“I’ll check my closet,” Sam sighed. He felt he spent enough time with people who wore unreasonably form-fitting outfits. Abed smiled pointily, and Sam, contradictorily, felt a little sorry that he knew offhand he didn’t have any silver spandex in his closet. 

“Come see.” Abed darted back behind the door. 

By the time Sam got behind that same door Abed had effected a costume change. He had a deerstalker perched on his head and a curved pipe clamped between his teeth. The robe and bowler peeked out from behind the enormous leather armchair in which he was sitting. Troy was posed on one arm of the chair, and Annie on the other. 

It wasn’t the joke Sam would have gone with if he’d thought about it a couple seconds longer, but walking into a living movie poster startled it out of him: “Do I need a safeword for this?” 

Annie reached over Abed to clap her hands over Troy’s ears. Her face suggested that Sam had actually whipped his dick out. She had some mean doe eyes on her to be firing that expression off. “We’re easing him into _normal_ sex, don’t complicate things,” she hissed, and then blushed. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” 

Troy shook her off. “Britta said you guys have to stick to conversations everyone can participate in!” 

“Was the way it sounded _inaccurate_ , though?” Jeff was in another leather armchair. There were a lot of them in this room, as well as leather-bound books. There was, overall, a lot of leather. Glass-fronted shelves at either end of the room held taxidermied animals. In cubbyholes above the books were rodent skulls and coral under glass domes. 

Annie smoothed her skirt. “That pose made a lot more sense when Abed proposed it.” She snatched the tartan beret off her head. It matched her skirt. 

“The pose was good. I stand by it as an artistic decision. It’ll be the poster when I make a documentary about our discoveries.” Abed swept his hand in a broad arc, palm up. “Welcome to a room worthy of our intellectual pursuit, a quest in search of the truth of the natural world.” 

“I still think I should have been in the middle.” Troy hopped up and tucked a taxidermied barn owl under his arm, supporting it by the lacquered stump it was mounted on. “I’m taking Mrs. Pebbles on the roof. I saw a movie where a drop of rain brought a stuffed animal to life, so I think we should run an experiment to investigate that.” 

“Nope,” Jeff said without looking up from his phone. “I’m not paying for it when you drop it.” He was wearing a three-piece suit and loafers that reflected the paneled ceiling. There was a watch chain looping from his pocket. 

“Okay,” said Sam, “seriously, am I wearing the wrong thing?” 

Jeff finally raised his head. He also had the grace to look abashed. “I was Lord Bartleby VIII,” he blurted. “It turned out I’d been holding Annie prisoner the whole time—it made sense when Abed proposed it. Also, I won’t be going on the roof to count birds, because this suit is worth more than all of your lives.” 

Abed shook his head. “Ignore him. That’s Bartleby talking.” 

Britta stuck her head in the door. “Are you nerds done playing dress-up?” She gasped. “Annie, did Abed talk you into sitting on the arm of his chair like an _object_ , some _prize_ for a _man’s vanity_?” 

Annie out-gasped her. “It was equal opportunity—Troy was on the other arm—” 

“Sam,” Britta said, nose stuck high in the air, “Shirley wants you.”

“Sure,” Sam said, instead of _Thank god._

Shirley was waiting out front, bundled into a cheery purple windbreaker. Her hair sprang into a halo from beneath the band of her matching ear muffs. She waved a thermos. “Ooh, Sam,” she said. “I brought brownies and hot chocolate. We’ve got a trip to make.” 

“Stark called, huh?” Sam did his zipper back up. 

“The brownies are the size of the tears I shed when I realized I only got one,” Britta whispered. “Be ready to grab a handful when she offers you the container.” 

“I hope you didn’t see too much of those activities upstairs.” Shirley turned and started the walk to Stark Tower. “I’m a Christian woman. I almost always stay away from that nonsense.”

Britta snorted. Sam thought it was an impressive snort, but Britta appeared to think it was inadequate; she repeated it with more emphasis. “Bald-faced lies aside, sex between consenting adults in any number and gender combination is a beautiful thing,” she said. “Anyway, they weren’t having actual sex, or I’d have joined in.” 

“I just want Sam to know he can be part of the group without playing dress up,” Shirley said. “Even if I do make a mean Harry Potter.” She leveled a glare Britta’s way. “We can all be nice, normal birdwatchers who spend our weekends hoping pigeons will get nasty on the roof in those nice life-long monogamous pairs they have.” 

“Oh, well, yeah.” Britta, who looked like she’d be graceful until she started moving, hopped around a fire hydrant in a flurry of knees and elbows. “We’ve got more babies!” She waved a clipboard. “Three more of the nests hatched.” 

“Damn…” Sam took it and tried to decipher Britta’s loopy scrawl while dodging fellow pedestrians, but could only make out Shirley’s scratchier but legible _504 and 677 have brought two good pigeons to God’s green earth; baptized them both Steve in memory of pencils snapped_. “It’s working. I mean, step one is, anyway.” He tried to comport himself as if T’Challa might find out about this, but if T’Challa even found out he were here, his claim to not being a bird nerd would be over anyway, so he let himself grin pretty wide. “We can start confiscating eggs soon, we’ve probably got enough pigeons to attract more on their own—”

Shirley squealed and did that fist-shaking thing. Sam rehearsed the more specific ‘I know we’re both committed to like five other people, but’ version of his proposal. 

“But, uh,” he said. “Naming them might be a little... You know one’s probably going to die, right?” 

“I’m sorry?” She said it very brightly. He looked at Britta. Her smile was every bit as blinding and frozen. 

“Did either of you read any of the pamphlets they gave us? Even one of them.”

“Well…” Shirley busied herself confiscating the clipboard and tucking it into her purse. “We got together to go over the informational packets. I certainly gave them a good… glance.” 

“We are a _study_ group,” Britta said. “Not a book club. Annie does a lot of our primary source reading.” 

“And we were thrown off,” Shirley said. “Jeff wasn’t there, or Troy, or Pierce… I can’t focus on anything unless I’m doing it to ignore Pierce.” 

Britta snorted, her most sustained one yet. “Right, it was just us girls and Abed. We couldn’t absorb information without our menfolk.” Sam squashed the urge to sidestep, and accepted that he’d physically gotten sarcasm on his clothes. “Listen, Sam,” she continued, “I may not have ‘read the material,’” she actually did finger quotes, “but I am a woman of the world, well-traveled, battle-scarred, an eco-warrior with her finger on Mother Nature’s pulse. I think I can handle it. Hit me with this baby pigeon problem and I’ll see what I can do.” 

“It’s not… a problem,” Sam said. “It’s just how pigeons work. They usually lay two eggs, and then only one of the chicks makes it.” 

“Sure, I got that. But why? What do they die from? I am one hundred percent dedicated to this project, I have slept with multiple veterinarians, and I am willing to do what it takes to save our innocent feathered cousins.” 

Shirley waited, unhelpfully. Sam tried, “We’re not… supposed to save them. Doubling the number of pigeons is the opposite of what we’re trying to do.” 

“Oh.” Britta nodded, smiling like he’d stepped on her foot but she was still really committed to holding that door open for him. “Right! We know that. They’re not pets. They crapped through a girder on Stark Tower. This is a pest-control operation.” 

“Yeah.” She still looked pretty shocked by this old information. Sam narrowed his eyes. “Because fewer pigeons…” he prompted. 

“Means higher quality of life for the pigeons we do have. We don’t want to inflate their numbers so they’re forced to live in an overcrowded ecopathological state…” She raised her hand like she was in a classroom, and not already talking. 

Sam waited, but it looked like she seriously expected to be called on, and he was worried someone was going to throw something at her hand, these being the mean streets and all. “Britta?” he hazarded. 

“You could call my environmental efforts in Argentina ‘interfering’ too,” she did finger quotes with even more emphasis; Sam hadn’t realized it was possible to put your entire spine into finger quotes. “Or you could call American citizens knocking down an entire airport in Berlin ‘interfering’—” 

“It wasn’t the entire airport.” 

Shirley shuffled through her purse. “What did you do in Argentina again, Britta?” 

“I… went there…” Britta said carefully, “to replant the rainforest.” 

“How _nice_ ,” said Shirley. “Was it hard, planting all those trees?” 

“I did meet a kind, sensitive man while I was there. A wounded soul. Juan owned a motorcycle. I may have skipped out on my visa and okay, I’m not allowed back into the country—I bet _you’re_ not allowed back into Germany!” She pointed at Sam with a flourish. “For bad decisions you made at least partially because you were sleeping with Captain America! So…” she nodded. “I think we both could stand to have a little more human compassion for our fellow fugitives.” 

Sam felt that now wasn’t the time to mention the diplomatic perks of knowing T’Challa and Tony Stark. “Sure,” he said. “Look, Britta. These aren’t people. They’re birds. And they aren’t wild birds, they’re feral. We domesticated them, we brought them here, and we turned them loose. Now we can manage the population humanely, or we can keep overfeeding them until we get too many, and then put out poison for them later when they get annoying. Sorry about Juan, I guess things didn’t work out,” he added. 

Britta slumped. “It’s okay. He had way better hair than Jeff, so it never would have worked out if I’d introduced him to the group.” She slumped further. “I guess it would be good for Pierce to take another stab at accepting some recognizable concept of death.” 

Shirley shook her head. “We better make sure nobody takes any lava lamps up there, just in case.” 

“What?” said Sam, who knew better than to ask, but was still hoping his Bucky-and-Natasha rules didn’t apply to these nice normal people. 

Shirley smiled, dazzlingly, and dug a container from her purse. “Brownie?” 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Tony had four pigeons for them, two in each cat carrier. He also had coffee in a line-up of Stark Industries travel mugs, which Sam assumed was by way of a bribe to get them to take the pigeons away faster. He had to assume, because Tony had his phone to his ear. 

“I know that,” Tony told his phone. “Mm, you’re still telling me, but I already know, and if you finish that sentence I’ll have learned something I didn’t care about in the first place three times today—hey, Sam, how are you? There’s something wrong with one of those monsters, just so you’re aware. Not the painting, I know they’re supposed to look like that, I’m talking to the Falcon, maybe you’ve heard of him. Seriously, that bird is hideous and deformed, I don’t know if you guys want to put it down or what but don’t do it here, because those little old ladies will find out and I’ll have such an animal cruelty lawsuit on my hands—I swear if they don’t stop feeding these things I’m setting Pepper on them.” 

“I’ll give it a transfusion from my own veins before I let you harm this helpless creature,” Britta said, grabbing the nearest cat carrier. 

“That’d do it.” Shirley was toying with her Stark Tower security badge. “Are these transferrable? My boys’d love to see this place.” 

“Oh,” Tony said. “Oh, she did? We do. I could have. To be fair, you started the sentence on a very down note, and it didn’t inspire a lot of confidence… Yeah, I’m hanging up.” He pocketed his phone and pointed at the other cat carrier. “In there.” He kissed Sam absently on his way by. “Happy probably caught it because it’s infirm. Good luck, though.” He froze and backed up several steps. “Did I do anything weird just now? And I want to emphasize, before you answer, that I just spent several months in France, and etiquette is different there, so I might be jet-lagged socially.” 

“Nope,” Sam said emphatically. “Nothing Steve or Bucky or Pepper need to hear about. Ever.” 

“Right. Or Natasha. Can we maybe underline that?” 

“Or Natasha.” He paused. “You didn’t say Rhodes.” 

“You’re the one who didn’t say Rhodey. I don’t have to say Rhodey. I’m always thinking it. And here’s the thing, I think Rhodey might be a little into it? I’m reserving Rhodey.”

“Stark, if you tell Rhodes, I’m telling Natasha.” 

“Bye, Sam. Bye… Sam’s friends. Yeah, bring the kids next time.” 

“Tony—”

Britta, who’d bent over to look into the other carrier, shrieked. “It’s got E.T. eyes!” 

“I did not join a pigeon club for this but the good Lord knows how best to try us,” Shirley told the ceiling. 

“Shit,” Sam said, but let Tony go in favor of picking up the cat carrier. “If I get alien birds on top of alien bugs, I quit.” He peered in. One of the pigeons was a normal-if-not-quite-average white and brown. The other was deep, iridescent green, and it did in fact have bulging, naked E.T. rings around its protuberant blue eyes. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s a show pigeon. It’s just bred to look weird. Must’ve escaped.” 

“There are show pigeons? They breed them into freaks and then parade them around? Protesting this is going to be so much fun.” Britta managed to balance her carrier and coffee while holding the door for him. “There’s an upside even to animal cruelty, if you look at it right. Is this one going to be okay?” 

“It seems like it was getting along okay so far. Little skinny, maybe, but pigeons are pretty understanding about weird features between friends. Maybe it’ll hook up with a beefy escaped racing pigeon and their babies’ll even out.” 

Shirley put her arm through his. “You know,” she said, “we’re very understanding about weird features between friends too. Whatever unfortunate torrid affair you've struck up with Iron Man and Captain America, we knew when we chose you that you had a lot going on, and we’re willing to… drat.” She pointed at the corner. “Here we go.” 

Sam sighed. They’d almost gotten out of Stark Tower without Tony Stark embarrassing him, and without running into a little old lady feeding the pigeons. Almost. 

“I got it,” Britta said. She handed her coffee to him and her cat carrier to Shirley. “I lived in—I've lived here before.” She strode ahead, arms akimbo. “Hey!” she yelled. “I want to _understand why you’re doing this_ so we can _come together to a solution that works for both of us_!” 

“I’ll work a solution out on this old biddy’s face if she doesn’t move along and stop undoing my good work,” Shirley said very quietly. It was, weirdly, almost as erotic an experience for Sam as when Steve threw motorcycles at things. 

The little old lady dumping seeds from a sack spun to meet Britta, whipping off her bulky winter hat. It turned out they hadn’t run into a little old lady feeding the pigeons, because this was a middle-aged Chinese guy in a dress identical to Bernice’s. 

“Oh, _darn_.” Shirley swerved away from _damn_ at the last possible verbal second. 

The middle-aged Chinese guy was cackling. “You can’t stop me!” he said. “There’s not even a city ordinance against this!” He ripped into the bag and upended it, shaking it out until he was ankle-deep in birdseed. 

“Damnit, Chang.” Britta kicked the pile, startling several pigeons that had already fluttered in for their regularly scheduled lunch. “You don’t care about birds. Or animals. Or people. Why are you spending money on pigeons?” 

“I didn’t spend a cent on these flying rats, I just told Bernice I’d take over her route while she’s down with a cold. The way I see it, I’m throwing a wrench in your works, _and_ laying the foundations for my city-wide network of minions, all for free.” He cackled again, and then spotted Sam. “Hey, you’re an Avenger. Can I get some feedback on my evil laugh? I’m going for the big leagues, and I’d hate to embarrass myself out there. I don’t expect to be Doctor Doom right out of the gate, _obviously_ ,” he paused to laugh normally and elbow Britta. “Right?” He sobered. “But I would like to set my personal goals high, and if you could help me out at all, it’d mean a lot.” 

Sam inhaled deeply and held it for a count of five, or at least three. Not like Bucky was here to call him on not practicing what he preached. "You're gonna get plenty of feedback without my help. You know you're on like twelve security cameras, right?" 

"Duh." Chang rolled his eyes. "I want you guys to have footage for the origin story when you make a documentary about your greatest foe. I've been emailing Stark my ominous video diaries for weeks." 

“That’s interesting,” Britta said, digging in her purse and producing a small leather-bound notebook and gold pen. “I’m a licensed psychologist now, and professionally, I would love to know why you think five-hour videos of you singing an anthem dedicated to yourself and then sobbing on your desk are threatening.” 

“I didn’t send him _those_ ones. Obviously.” He eyed Sam. “Quick Avenger check, though, did that concept send a shiver down your spine? I know some of you freaks have weird weaknesses.” 

Sam actually did count backwards from ten, in full. “No,” he said. “My spine held pretty firm, all things considered.” 

“How about this concept: Me, greased up like a pig at a county fair, living in the air ducts of your apartment building for months at a time, watching you through the vents. Ask them, I’ll do it, man, don’t question that for a second.” 

Sam choked. “Yeah, that’d do it. My quirky superhero weakness, I don’t like people living in my walls. Seriously, dude, have you ever suggested that to somebody and they were like, ‘no, it doesn’t bother me’?” 

“Hawthorne wouldn’t even blink, and you’d be surprised what Winger’s up for.” 

Britta snatched her coffee back in order to cough something into it about how Jeff probably lived his best life when he thought he had a constant audience. 

“Ben,” Shirley said, stretching it out to two sweet syllables. “I know you don’t want to make me regret the way I let you see Ben Jr. on second Wednesdays.” 

Chang ducked slightly, like she’d thrown something. “You can’t forbid me from seeing my own son!” 

“In the name of Jesus Christ, I pray dear Lord, see me through these hard times,” Shirley said low in her throat, and then added, with a hell of a lot more volume, “No tail!” 

“Fine, but my own namesake. There are courts that will back me up—” he abandoned this argument halfway through. His face balled up like wet tissue and he started crying. There was a lot of chin involved. 

“All right,” Shirley snapped. “I’ll see you on Wednesday. If—and I mean if!—you drop this supervillain nonsense. And I mean drop it, Ben!” 

Chang dried his eyes with the sleeve of his dress and mimed dropping something. It apparently shattered when it hit the sidewalk, judging by his flinch. “Here’s the thing,” he said, tapping his fingers together, a reasonable man making a reasonable request. “I don’t have a lot else going on right now, without the supervillain thing, and I did make some promises to some other hopefuls, including Todd and Evil Abed. Is there any way I could maybe chill with one of you guys until that blows over?” 

Sam took a break from trying to give them some privacy for this family dispute and snuck a look at Shirley, and immediately put a hand on her shoulder. Her expression said ‘immanent assault charges.’ He’d have done the same for Bucky or Nat. Probably not Steve, but only because they had near-identical boiling points. 

“I’ll give you Pierce’s address,” Britta said. She dropped her notebook back in her purse and produced a physical address book. Sam had last seen one of those in his mother’s house. “For Ben Jr.’s sake. Just sneak in and act like you’ve been there for a while.” 

Chang cast a look of pure, distilled essence of pleading Shirley’s way. Shirley, mouth compressed to half its size and eyes blown to twice theirs, spoke silently of upping those assault charges to murder. “Man,” Sam said, “I don’t want to be part of whatever the hell this is, but I will drive you to Pierce’s house myself if you let this go right now.” 

Chang’s shoulders sloped and he lost a foot in height as his spine curved. “Fine. And you bet I’ll be taking you up on that offer when you least expect it. Shirley, I’d like to apologize in advance for what I’m about to say and stress that as the mother of my namesake you’re exempt, but: Chang out, bitches!”

Sam was, at that point, expecting a magic trick. At least some smoke. Chang, in reality, straight up turned and ran away, dress and feed bag flapping. 

“Huh,” Sam said. 

“Oh, go ahead.” Shirley clasped her purse to her chest. “I know you want to ask.” 

“I might have wanted to. Wasn’t gonna. I’m just grateful that was my supervillain for the day.” 

“He’ll find out,” Britta said, again into her coffee. 

“Well, Sam, when a man dressed as Peggy Flemming and a woman dressed as Glinda the Good Witch are being attacked by their closest friends, and are very high on experimental food rejected by the military, and later they don’t remember anything they might have done together, but maybe one of them left some kind of record—” 

“You know what, never mind,” Sam said. “I think I get it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read about lesser waterboatmen in [Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish, and Other Weird Animals](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15853131-zombie-tits-astronaut-fish-and-other-weird-animals), by Becky Crew, but here's [an article](https://www.wired.com/2011/07/insect-penis-sound/) about it. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed, & comment should it strike your fancy~!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I just realized that my debt to [Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4683341) reaches some ridiculous levels in at least one of the Natasha/Sam interactions here, but... I'm standing by it. A constant across the universes, Natasha interrogating Sam over his emotional state.

“Now,” said Sam, and fired off one of the little pills Stark had cooked up as bullet substitutes, “now I _know_ I’m not the only one who feels embarrassed. I don’t want to have to fight an actual thinking supervillain three times, but a bunch of bugs he summoned from outer space? People are gonna talk.” The bug-bullet worked better than the actual bullets had, in that the midair jellyfish he’d hit started leaking instead of letting the projectile pass right on through its body without apparent effect. That didn’t help him too much with the thousand other bugs right behind it, he and Wanda the only ones who could get up in the air to head them off before they dove at the others, but it was a morale boost. 

“Why are they still coming?” Steve threw his shield between a bug and the side of Sam’s head. Sam had to catch it to stop it hitting him, but it did take the brunt of the goo that would have gotten in his ear otherwise. “We destroyed the… hive. Thing.” 

Bucky sighed gustily over the comms. “Still not sure why you thought that would make the rest of them lie down and die.” 

“It worked in New York!”

“So you say.” 

“It was _internationally televised_.” 

“So was the movie with the blue cat people.” 

“Was it?” Sam tossed the shield back high so Steve had to jump for it, which removed his feet from the path of the next bug and let Sam shoot it. 

Steve looked wounded, although, thanks to Sam, he wasn’t. His boots were pretty badly gooped, though. “You saw us—!”

“I mean the movie. I know you saved the world, baby, don’t worry. Was that movie ever on TV? A non-3D version with commercial breaks?”

“Actually,” said Scott. He sounded like he was about to give a list of dates and channels. 

“ _Actually,_ ” said Bucky, in even loftier tones, “it’s disappointing how uninventive a lot of modern science fiction is, with all the inspiration right here in real life. If you think about it, it’s stupid most sci-fi insists on one guy fucking one girl even in alien species. Lots of birds have sexual communes of up to five members and help each other raise the kids. Lots of raptors, even. Including eagles and—” 

“Don’t say falcons,” Sam said. “We’re mid-mission. This conversation is a matter of public record. Do not say falcons.”

“Well, they do.” 

Sam saw the face of death. It looked like the knowledge that T’Challa had access to everything they’d just said. It also looked like a tidal wave of bugs massing on them, tentacles spewing little stinging bombs. “I thought coming back to fight these things three times was embarrassing… Getting killed by them is going to be way worse. Anyone makes it through this, I want you to lie for the death certificate, lie to my family, lie on my tombstone…” 

“All right,” said Wanda soothingly, “it looks very bad.” 

“Did you just condescend to me? Do _you_ have a plan for not getting sucked dry by bug number one thousand and eighty while you’re busy with numbers one thousand and four through seventy-nine?” 

“Actually,” said Natasha, in Bucky’s exact tone. 

“Natasha and I do have a plan, yes,” Wanda finished for her. "Sam, get back." 

Sam could barely see her through the cloud of bugs, a few hundred yards away and even higher up than he was, but the blue light crackling around her like the surface of a bubble was easier to track. It expanded abruptly, doubling in size, and he reversed out of its way. 

“Do you think vultures can smell these things, once they’re dead?” Steve spun his shield straight up, scattering bugs. “We’ve got a vortex forming. Probably _Neophron percnopterus_. Or is that a vote of no-confidence from the local wildlife?” 

The shield sliced into the bubble, ricocheted off the top, hit the bottom, and stayed there. 

“Steve,” Wanda protested. “Now I can’t give it back to you for a while. Do you know how hard it is to make a wall so things can come in but not go out again?” 

“Well, nobody told me about the plan.” Steve caught the gun Bucky tossed him without letting it distract him from all that petulance he needed to express. 

“I wasn’t sure I could do it.” The bubble crackled out again, swallowing another couple hundred bugs. The ones in Sam’s vicinity seemed confused. If oblong blobs of jelly, legs, and tentacles could be confused. They were definitely slacking off on their bombs and drifting lower, scuttling around in midair. It was hard to tell which way they were facing at any given moment, but he thought they might be turning in Wanda’s direction. 

“Bet me,” said Natasha. She sounded exhilarated. That didn’t bode well. She had that in common with Steve: the less sure they were a plan would work, the happier they were about it. “If I get us out of this, Sam, you owe me a date. I know it’s not our week, but just the two of us.” 

“No,” said Bucky, with impressive emphasis for someone splitting his attention between this and picking off monsters from another world at a thousand yards. 

“Sure,” said Sam. 

“Deal,” said Natasha. “Sit back, boys, Wanda and I will take care of it.”

x-x-x-x-x-x-x

The cleanup after a mission could, on occasion, shock Sam and be pretty enjoyable. It was no ‘plunging in from the clear blue sky, guns blazing, set to kick death in the face,’ but it had its own rewards. The occasions in question, the ones where the rewards stood out, tended to be the ones preceded by a nap, a shower, and a change of clothes. After that, Sam was in a better frame of mind to lift heavy things. The rewarding occasions also tended to be the ones where the Avengers had lots of help and the civilians wanted the Falcon’s autograph. This hadn’t been one of those. 

Sam leaned back in the knobbly wrought-iron chair and discovered yet another entire muscle group he’d strained. “You think this place has punch-cards?” 

“Not for us, is my guess.” Steve had one hand on the fish tank in the center of their table. His harassed expression said that said he was mentally rehearsing his explanation to the Romanian government for every step they’d taken, while also planning a strategy for dazzling Tony out of a real debrief using the scientific appeal of a tank full of aliens. “That’ll be on the next big anti-Avengers petition. We place excessive demands on local businesses and then hang around, sweating on everything.” 

“Some of us do.” Natasha smirked and sipped something pink. Her hair was dark at the temples, but she didn’t smell as bad as the rest of them. She’d changed out of her black leather, into a sundress and a floppy hat. 

“They love me here,” Bucky said. “If there was a punch card, I’d have one.” He had been served his drob first. Sam, who had stuck with lángos, had his suspicions about whether that was a good thing. 

“Do you think they’re breathing okay?” Sam put a finger up to the tank. One of the bugs stuck a tentacle to the glass on the other side. It looked like the spawn of an unholy union between a giant mutant pill bug and a jellyfish, and Sam had seen the hollowed-out carcasses left behind when they used those suckers. Still. With the glass in between, it was kind of cute. 

Bucky had a hand on the table to keep it from wobbling on the cobblestones, and a gun near his hand. They were positive these bugs were currently out of their little stinger-bombs, but Bucky maintained they might regenerate. “They come from _outer space_.”

“The duct tape’s in a grid,” Steve said. “I made sure they’ve got air holes.” 

“My hero.” Sam leaned over and gave Steve a pointed kiss. Even his lips were salty. Sam really hoped that was just sweat, not bug gunk. 

Steve wound himself back from the upcoming day of general post-mission disturbances into the present. He arched the hunch out of his shoulders and kneaded at Sam’s lower back. “A quarrel of sparrows,” he said idly, pointing out from under their awning with his fork. “ _Passer domesticus_.” 

“You got good eyes. I only see two sparrows.” They were taking turns picking at a crack between cobblestones. 

Steve dug his fingers into a knot and Sam sighed as a line of tension up to his neck drained out. “Two counts as a quarrel.” 

“Female Japanese quail go out for weaker males. The ones that lose fights.” Bucky eyed Steve’s arm and speared a piece of egg on his knife. 

Sam ducked away from Steve with a groan. “I hate both of you. I’m taking Wanda to the party.” 

“To this potluck to talk about pigeons? No thank you, Sam.” She said it politely, with only a low undercurrent of horror, barely distinguishable over the comms.

“Goddamnit, that’s normal. Did you hear that? That was the appropriate response, is what that was.” Sam tugged at the collar of his ‘lightweight’ but fire- and wind-resistant body armor. When they left Wanda at the farm that had agreed to house their bubble of contained space bugs, she looked as wrung out as the rest of them. In her case because she was maintaining a psycho-tech net around the living bugs, not because she’d spent a filthy, aching hour scooping up the dead ones. But she’d also looked a hell of a lot more comfortable than Sam felt, because she’d had the nerve to ask Natasha for a spare dress. 

“I’d go with you,” Scott offered, also over the comms. He’d stayed with Wanda as backup while they waited for Vision to get there to help install a roomier and more permanent bug cage. Specifically, Scott had stayed as the only backup the farmer allowed. There was apparently a one-Sokovian, one-American, zero-Russians policy. 

“Would you?” Bucky and Natasha said, together, in exactly the same tone. 

“Well,” Scott said. “As a friend. As a gentleman. With no ulterior motive.” 

“Thanks, Scott, that’s a nice offer,” Sam said loudly, and pulled his earpiece out rather than encourage the kind of behavior Bucky was opening his mouth to engage in. 

“That circlage of martins is busy down the street,” Steve mumbled. “ _Delichon urbicum_. Just thought I’d mention it.” 

Sam made an effort not to look. He liked their funky little nests, but now he was listening, he could hear their squeaky-toy calls either way. 

Natasha braced herself on Sam’s seat and leaned in close, pulling her hat off. She used it to fan him. “Don’t look now, but I think your fanclub found us.” 

“Huh?” Sam did look now. “Oh, hardy-har-har.” 

The little thundercloud of pigeons ricocheted around the square, avoiding awnings and swarming around columns, then settled near their table. 

“A fix of pigeons,” Steve told his plate. “Columbia livia.” 

Natasha dropped her hat on Sam’s head and took over where Steve had left off rubbing his back. After three hours in the wings and another with a shovel, Sam did the ungentlemanly thing and let her. “We owe you, you know,” she said. “All those pamphlets lying around, about how killing something that out-reproduces the slaughter is a losing tactic. I started chatting Mr. Rădulescu up last time. Well, I made Wanda chat him up. He really hates Russians. Even more than he likes what good fertilizer our bugs make when they melt.” Sam was sure Natasha hadn’t done anything so ungraceful as hitch her chair over the cobbles, but she was a lot closer now than when she’d started. She leaned into his arm and fanned her front with the dress, plucking it away from her chest and letting it fall back. The view was phenomenal. “You’ll have to thank your pigeons,” she said. “On behalf of us and all the… well. Cho will beat Tony to describing them and naming them, right?” 

“She’d better. How do you think Pepper’s gonna like it when Tony tells her she’s got a flying alien jellyfish named after her?” Sam put his other fingers to the glass. The demonic space bug responded with four more tentacles, wafting over to perch opposite his hand. 

“I could take pity on him and text an anonymous tip that the gesture would be appreciated more by anyone else in his life.” 

“Nat, I love you and I respect your methods, but we all know who it is when someone texts us an anonymous tip. You get that, right?” 

She shrugged, which made for another phenomenal view. “Plausible deniability,” she said, and leaned in closer, sugar on her breath. “I’ll deny it if you repeat this, but sometimes it’s Fury.” 

Sam dismissed the urge to try and remember everything he’d gotten an anonymous tip about. “You couldn’t have told me that before I started responding to all anonymous tips with ‘in bed’ jokes?” 

“You made that joke-bed yourself and now you have to lie in it.” She dragged her thumb down his spine. “You’re not acting very pleased with yourself for accidentally solving our intergalactic wildlife issue.” 

“No, hey, I’m glad.” He clinked his glass to hers. “Congratulations to you and Wanda.” 

“No preening at all? You could be rubbing this in Bucky’s face as we speak.” 

He shrugged, or tried to. His left shoulder blade gave out when she flexed her fingers just beneath it. He checked that Steve and Bucky were involved with their phones before he said, “You and Wanda are steering the version that’s gonna work.” 

“Oh?” It was a borderline interrogation-level nonresponse. 

He pulled a face at her but walked into it anyway. “This thing the university’s got us doing, I assume they got a grant for it because it worked in… Switzerland, or wherever. But dude, no way it’s gonna work in Manhattan. We’re moving the pigeons somewhere nicer, okay, but if the population numbers were driven by how many penthouse apartments are on offer, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. They were livestock, we bred them to survive overcrowding. The numbers are driven by food. As long as the buffet’s open, they don’t have to waste time scavenging, so they’ll just keep making more pigeons until they overflow right back onto Stark Tower. And in Manhattan, you tell me some cute rhyming posters are gonna convince people to stop feeding pigeons. If the university even bothers to do that. Nothing so far.” 

Natasha hooked one of her boots around the leg of his chair. “But… nothing ventured, nothing gained.” 

“I guess. It’s making Tony feel better about that girder. It’s not hurting anybody.” He closed a hand around his earpiece, to make extra sure. “And the pigeons are cute.” 

“Tony would run a poster campaign if you asked him to. ‘Iron Man wants _YOU_ to stop feeding pigeons.’” 

Sam groaned. “You know he’d make Steve do it.” 

She smiled only slightly, but sparkled with it. “Even better.” 

Sam considered the idea in more detail. His spirits lifted. “Maybe he’d make Steve do some more of those educational videos.” 

“See?” She twisted her knuckles low on his back, tied half the pain into a knot right there, and then yanked it loose. “Now aren’t you glad I’m picking you up the day after tomorrow at the V.A., 1:15 sharp?” 

Bucky dropped his phone on the table with a clatter. He was glaring at Natasha. “The uloborid spider,” he said, “doesn’t just immobilize its prey in silk. It wraps them up and uses the shroud to crush them.” 

Natasha filled her straw and blew its contents across the table at him. “Yes, it does.” 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x

“Jeff…” Sam rubbed his forehead. He didn’t have a headache yet, but he felt there had to be one lurking in his near future. “Dude, I don’t… does the question ‘what the hell are you doing?’ even cover it?” 

Jeff was wearing another ridiculously sharp suit, which was a look that got weirder on a roof in pearly pre-dawn light. That, at least, was some simple addition. Suit plus wrong place plus wrong time. The huge yellow rain poncho and the crazed look in his eyes when he whipped around … that multiplied the weirdness. Some exponential shit. 

“Sam.” Jeff grinned wide enough to display a whole lot of dedicated dental maintenance. “You’re very early.” 

“You’re… Well, you’re feeding the birds we’re not supposed to feed. We could start there.” 

Jeff dropped another handful of bird seed into the small crowd of pigeons around his feet. He had hospital booties over his shoes. “I’d like this to be a landmark moment in our long journey together,” he said. “A moment in which we come to a deeper understanding of each other as men. And _as men_ , we have a duty to defend those weaker than we are. Those less able to defend themselves.”

“Jeffrey,” said Sam. He pressed on the bridge of his nose. Still no headache, but it’d be a doozy when it hit. “The pigeons are fine.” 

“I’m not talking about the _pigeons_.” His tone suggested he might have laced the bird seed with arsenic. “I’m talking about Troy and Abed.” 

Sam decided to try and dodge that. Maybe he wouldn’t have to hear about it. “They’re getting more than enough food to sustain a reasonable population level.” 

Jeff grimaced. “Mm, _are_ they, though? Because, as I understand it, we’re losing half our crop.”

“We’re supposed to lose half our—they’re not vegetables.” 

“That’s where you’re wrong!” Jeff pointed at him for emphasis, scattering seed and offended pigeons. “They are vegetables, metaphorically speaking. They’re unpleasant, they require way more effort than you want to put in considering what you get out of it, and they’re _necessary_. They teach valuable lessons about history, responsibility, the connectedness of all beings. They’re the vegetables of the _soul_. And we, the hunter-gatherers, if you will, owe it to the weaker members of our tribe to make sure they fill their dietary requirements.” 

Sam tilted his head back and asked patience of the morning smog. “Do hunter-gatherers have crops?” 

“Whatever!” Jeff sounded shrill, out of either frustration with the conversation or fear of the pigeon trying to steal seed out of his hand by hovering like a monstrously oversized hummingbird. Its wings thundered in valiant defiance of physics. 

Sam took pity on it and Jeff both. He stepped up and cupped his hands under the bird, giving it a perch. He went ahead and grimaced at the grit and grease on its feathers; not like he was going to hurt the bird’s feelings. “You got any Latverian in you, Jeff?”

“Are you going to ask me if I’d like some? Tentative yes, but I’d have to run it by Abed.” 

“I don’t—do I look Latverian to you?”

Jeff looked incredibly smug for someone wearing a poncho in the shade ‘rubber ducky.’ “I don’t really make assumptions like that. It’s just not who I am.” 

“Okay, Ancestry dot com. What I was driving at is, I just spent way too long defeating Victor von Doom. And while we’re on the subject, I also live with Steve Rogers. You’re getting fuck-all out of me with a big speech. Try just telling me what the hell you want.” 

“See, that’s not really who I am either.” 

“ _Try_ ,” Sam repeated. 

Jeff shuffled, sending a ripple through the crowd of pigeons. “Well, I want to minimize the number of times in a day I see Troy cry. I’d also like to eliminate altogether the sensation I get when I know Abed _would_ be crying, if he ever did that. I’m not exposing them to _baby bird corpses_. Feeding the birds helps me avoid those things. Feeding the birds without you finding out would have been ideal, because I realize this looks insane.” He dropped the rest of the birdseed. “Although, while I have you here, I’d like to request that you not sleep with Britta unless it’s in a group setting. If she gets you alone, she will fuck this up for us.” 

“Okay!” Sam said. “I’m walking away, because this conversation has tipped over the threshold into ‘too weird for me.’ That’s tough to do these days, dude, congratulations.” 

“I’ll see you later?” Jeff called after him. 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Sam made it back down to the third floor still in his snit, and almost ran straight into Abed. “Hello,” Abed said, unfazed by nearly colliding with a shadowy figure in a darkened public hallway pre-sunrise. 

“Hey,” Sam said, once he’d established he wasn’t about to get stabbed. He didn’t love Abed’s chances of not getting stabbed, if that was the kind of nonchalance with which he made his way alone through the morning. “Where you headed, man? I’ll walk you.” 

“To barricade all but one of the doors to a lecture hall. They have huge screens for their projectors. We’re going to watch _Die Hard_ on one of them later. Want to come? Shirley’s making cupcakes and Troy’s in charge of potato chips. Troy’s also in charge of pizza, because it’s Britta’s job officially but she’d get vegan cheese if no one stopped her.” 

“Weird thing is, despite the way that started, it ended up being the most normal movie-night offer I’ve gotten in a while. Is there maybe another way to reserve a lecture hall? You know, file some papers somewhere…” 

“Oh, I signed it out. Barricades will save time later. Annie’ll want to redecorate and if anyone sees and tries to take down the purple theater curtains and throw pillows…” Abed stopped. Not just stopped talking; he appeared to check out entirely for a second. Then he whirred back into action and repeated, “Barricades will save time later. Annie’s passionate about interior decoration.” 

“Uh, sure, then. You gonna tell me you brought sandbags, or are we just piling up desks and chairs?” 

Abed reached out from a full arm’s length away and put his hands on Sam’s biceps. “They’re lab tables. I wasn’t going to be able to move them without you.” 

Sam didn’t usually have a hard time figuring out whether or not he was getting hit on. Abed had good hands, though. Long, strong fingers. Sam was absolutely flexing, just in case. “You’re welcome. But… what about Jeff?”

Abed headed in the direction of the lecture hall. Sam could only hope this wasn’t going to get them kicked out of the building entirely. “What about Jeff?”

“He couldn’t help you out?”

“He dropped me off on his way to the gym. I’m not supposed to know he’s still here. He and Annie spent a long time fighting about this last night, though. They’re very loud whisperers.” 

“Good to know Annie’s on my side, I guess.” 

“Well.” Abed opened and closed his hand on the strap of his bag. “She’s not. You wish this program would work, but we’re not getting graded on results, so she just wants to be able to say we followed all the rules. Except you do both know it was never going to decrease the number of pigeons anyway, whether or not Jeff messed it up. So you’re on the same side of that.” 

“Oh yeah?” Sam stopped walking. Abed didn’t notice, so Sam had to hustle around in front of him and stop again, a little more dramatically. He put a hand on Abed’s chest to be sure. “What the hell, dude? Why did you all join up if none of you care whether it works?” 

Abed’s head tilted, birdlike. “Why did you?” 

Sam spent most of his time these days with people who engaged with the world very… physically. Any one of them would have knocked his hand away, or put theirs over it, or in Bucky’s case started making out with him on general principle. Abed just stood there, leaning ever so slightly forward. Sam could feel his heartbeat. Each second he didn’t take his hand away piled up with the ones before. 

“You knew before you joined that it wasn’t going to be an effective program, at least not for its stated purpose,” Abed said. “But I’m guessing you don’t usually do things you know are going to be pointless, so you probably had another reason for doing this. Maybe you just have a soft spot for invasive species.” He smiled, the softest and brightest expression Sam had seen on his face. “The pigeons are pretty adorable.” 

“You’re not wrong about that,” Sam said, groping mentally for a way to steer this conversation away from too close to home. 

“I’m pretty adorable, too,” Abed provided, considerately. 

Sam found they were standing very close together, and that Abed was very conveniently aligned for kissing, and that he, Sam, had accomplished none of this, and that Abed had had to compliment himself. “I’m usually smoother than this.” 

“You can be smooth for Shirley,” Abed said, and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That about raptors in sexual communes comes up from time to time when I'm reading about birds (usually as a Surprising Oddity no matter how many times it happens), but the citation I have handy is from Matt Walker's [Fish That Fake Orgasms](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/900813.Fish_That_Fake_Orgasms), which is also where I got the Japanese quail and uloborid spiders. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed, & comment should it strike your fancy~!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I... did it._

Natasha planted a fingertip on her straw and steered it around the circumference of her glass. “This place has been open fifty-seven years,” she said. “On and off. It changes its name every couple decades. Whenever the health inspector cracks down too hard. Sell it someone else in the family, renovate a little, rise from the ashes.” She nodded at Sam’s plate. “Those fries might be hot out of the very same grease that sizzled in that very same vat in 1938.” 

“That’s how you know it’s good.” Sam, in case that was a dare, ate another fry. “You really know how to take a guy out on the town. I gotta say, though, if I wanted to hear ‘one time I worked in a restaurant and we dumped leftovers back in the pot’ stories while I eat, I’d have gone out with Bucky.” 

Natasha sighed fondly. “Isn’t it great how he has a horror story for every occasion?” 

“It’s great how he suddenly remembers every job he’s ever had when there’s a horror story to be told.” The fries, swimming in germs almost as old as his boyfriends or not, were crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside, and delicious all over. He ate another. 

“I have kind of a funny story, if you’re up for a change of pace.” She speared a piroshok. “This is embarrassing, but all this time I thought your merry crew were snipping these pigeons’s flight feathers or something to make them stay at their new home.” 

“What? Jesus, out on the roof alone all day, Nat? Something would eat them. Maybe an undergrad.” 

“Well, don’t pigeon racers spend thousands of dollars on birds they can’t even fly, because they’d head home to the loft they were raised in? They’re just breeding stock, right? I thought it was a big deal to move pigeons.” She swiped another fry, but traded him a couple mushroom-heavy piroshki, so he let it pass. “I looked it up, though. Different variety of the species, I get it. Your street pigeons aren’t nuts about moving, but if they wake up somewhere better… Or if they look across the street and some friends beckon…” She met his eyes abruptly, and he realized he’d been tapping his heel nervously. But she grinned and said, “Do I qualify for your club now?” 

Sam slumped back against the booth. His shoulders settled into near-grooves in the wood. “You too, huh?” 

“I could do a much better normal-person impression than either of them.” 

He tipped slowly forward again until he could rest his elbows on the table. “About that,” he said. “Maybe it’s not as much of a concern as I was, uh, hoping. I could invite Scott along to ride on my shoulder ant-sized the whole time, and I don’t think they’d even blink during the introductions.” 

Natasha spun the ice in her glass. “So take me, and your boytoys don’t have to know your dirty secret.

Sam laughed. “Would you really want to go? Forget getting one over on Bucky and Steve for a sec. You want to go talk pigeons for an hour?” 

“There are a lot of bird-related activities in this city. A _lot_. You could have found cooler birds. But you chose pigeons.” 

Sam set his palms on the table and pressed into the faint sensation of old grease. He spread his fingers like Natasha was going to engage him in a round of the knife game. “You know my dad was a chaplain in the army,” he said, and Natasha nodded. “Gideon swears he heard so many guys call our dad ‘Chaps’ he thought it was his name. And that’s, uh—we grew up on army bases, for a while there. South Korea, Canada, Australia, Germany. It’d always look like an American suburb got dropped there in the seventies. Our parents weren’t nuts about it as a way to raise kids, but they made sure we knew where we came from. We came from D.C. Our grandfather graduated from Howard, our dad graduated from Howard, we were graduating from Howard. We’d spend summers with our grandparents and Grams’d sign us up to help out at a soup kitchen or pick litter out of the river, because you take care of your hometown.” 

Natasha pushed her hands toward his on the table, fingers spread just as wide. She inched them between his. “And then you moved to New York.” 

“Started a little earlier than that. I dropped out of Howard my first year, joined the Air Force… which was almost as bad as dropping out, not joining the Army. Still not as bad as dropping back out of the Air Force, found out later. I didn’t always get on too well with my dad.” He slid his fingers under hers, then flipped his palms up. Natasha’s fingernails were unpolished, smooth, blank half-circles. He’d seen her pick up and drop the habit of biting them for one role, and grow them to wicked red spikes for another. They were too short now even to feel when she closed her hands on his, hard. “I don’t know where I was going with this,” he said. “Too old to quit volunteering for dirty work, I guess.” 

“Mm-hm.” 

“Sarah and Gideon are coming up here for Thanksgiving.” 

She knocked her heel into his under the table. He’d been jiggling his leg again. “I could look it up later, or you could just tell me…”

Sam snorted. “Yeah, they both graduated from Howard.” 

“Not much chance of introducing them to your normal, down-to-earth, socially conscious pigeon club?” 

“If I could get Shirley alone,” Sam sighed. “But she’d still be up against dating three Avengers and a year where I was a wanted fugitive. And… New York. So no. It wasn’t a great plan to start with, even if these people hadn’t been… whatever the hell they are.” 

Natasha hesitated. “You know we’d move back in a second, all three of us.” 

“Yeah. You know, our favorite aunt and uncle—they’re on Mom’s side—live in New Orleans. Just a lot easier to get along with when they’re not on top of you all the time. Gideon and Sarah and I, we’ve had a tough time with each other since Dad died... ” Sam shook his head. “Like you said, I chose pigeons. They don’t like moving too many times.” 

She bit her lip, but then she nodded and her lips curved, just shy of a real smile. “Is now a good time to tell you I already have my own invitation to the party?” 

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

There was a chaise lounge in the study. Sam didn’t know when or how that had happened, and he decided he didn't want to. “Did anyone else actually bring a guest?” he asked Abed. 

Abed, who was snifting his champagne flute of sparkling grape juice—still, he’d been at it for a while—paused. His eyes widened, then narrowed. “Yes,” he said, and audibly cut himself off midsentence. 

Troy started crying. Sam had some trouble processing this, but it was definitely happening. Troy went, in seconds, from standing next to him chugging grape juice to standing next to him racked by sobs. “We can’t lie to an Avenger!” he wailed into his own hand. “We could go to _prison_.” He buried his face in Sam’s left shoulder, and grabbed his right, and slid over. By the end of the maneuver had managed to fling himself into Sam’s arms, albeit slowly. 

“It’s not a lie.” Abed extended a finger. “Pierce is bringing a guest.” 

“So that we can pretend we’re normal people with other friends!” Troy wept into Sam’s neck. He ran his hands up and down Sam’s back. “You feel so good,” he said, in the same tone he’d used to condemn himself to prison. 

“Thanks,” said Sam, and he meant it. Troy smelled really nice. Like grapes and, weirdly, roses. He patted Troy’s back. It wasn’t any stranger than the times Tony did this, he told himself, except in that Troy was sober. 

“Oh my, are you starting already?” Shirley said. “Oh, Troy’s just crying. Never mind.” She joined Sam in patting his back. “Troy… did you steal my bodywash again?” 

“It doesn’t matter,” Troy wept. “None of us will have bodywash in prison.” 

Natasha could, when called upon, make quite an entrance. So what surprised Sam wasn’t that both doors hit the wall when she entered at that opportune moment. What surprised him was that she hadn’t made the entrance. She was an accessory to the entrance. Britta and Annie stormed in, and Natasha was carried in their wake. 

“I didn’t ask the Black Widow to threaten my landlord into letting me grow organic weed on the roof!” Britta said through an impressive wad of gum, to which she was adding another stick. 

“Jeff!” Annie’s voice was right up against an upper limit in the psychics of audible pitch. “Britta asked the Black Widow to threaten—” She foundered as she found she’d lost shock value. “Well, she did!” 

“Honey, I’ve asked you not to set a bad example for Pierce. You know how impressionable he is.” Jeff didn’t look up from his phone. 

Annie’s face set. In Sam’s world, an expression that dire between friends often meant someone was about to get shot with an experimental device based on alien technology. “Britta also,” she said, voice trembling with emphasis, “put Hello Kitty stickers on the pen and notebook you gave her for Christmas.” 

Judging by Jeff’s expression, she might as well have shot him. “That’s a Montblanc!” 

Britta shoved the gum wrapper in her pocket. “It looks unfriendly. Chang didn’t trust me when I was that imposing and professional, I could tell. I have to be accessible to these lost and wounded souls, Jeff. I need to reach their inner—” 

Shirley offered her a plate of cookies. “Their inner twelve-year-old girl, or their inner thirty-something woman who still impulse-buys stickers in the checkout line at Target, where she claims not to shop because their clothes are made by impoverished children in India?” 

Natasha, who had slipped around this brawl to Sam’s side, locked her arms around his waist from behind, unperturbed by Troy’s presence at his front. She stood on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. “They were like this the whole way over,” she whispered, and continued to stare, rapt. “I love them. I think this is the way Thor feels about us.” 

Sam tried not to categorize his current feeling as dread. 

“Too low, Shirley!” Britta lifted her chin, proud even in ignominious defeat. Sam sighed. He clearly had a type. 

“ _Really_ low, Shirley,” Jeff agreed, warmly, and crossed his legs. 

“We won’t do it!” Both doors hit the wall again. Pierce burst in with his arm around the shoulders of a man who looked like the curator of a museum. Maybe a museum of the world’s greatest tyrants, but to be fair, Sam might have that sour twist to his mouth too, if he were clamped to Pierce’s side. “You can’t make us, Winger!”

Jeff broke away from his phone with the expression of a condemned man who’d been told he had hope for a stay of execution, but had never put all that much faith in his luck. “Of course you won’t,” he sighed. “Why do I still delude myself into thinking I can depend on you, Pierce? To do anything? If I asked you to breathe you’d drop down dead.” 

“We won’t deny our relationship again!” Pierce continued. He was manic and wide-eyed and, overall, he reminded Sam of Jeff on the roof the other day. “We’re not friends!” He shook the man under his arm. 

“That’s relatively true today.” Sam would have believed this man had never smiled in his life, except just then his lips cracked upward at the corners like Pierce had said something touching. 

“Congratulations,” Jeff snapped. “None of us are actually friends with Pierce.” 

“Oh, Jeffrey.” Shirley looked heavenward. “Don’t. You’ll make him fake another heart attack and we’ll have to cry so he knows we love him. I can’t keep crying over the death of a man I know is trying to peep up my skirt from his convulsions on the floor.” 

Pierce slowly dropped his hand from his chest. “As I was saying,” he continued, at a less fevered pitch, “Sam. Gilbert is not my friend, and he didn’t come here because he cares about my interests or hobbies—” 

“That’s not true,” Gilbert said. “Although I do prefer the sanitary ones.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Pierce hasn’t gone anywhere near an actual bird,” Annie said cheerily. 

“Of course he hasn’t! _That_ would be helpful!” Jeff said, more cheerily. 

“Gilbert,” Pierce pursued, “is my brother, the inheritor of the Hawthorne family fortune. And he came out of the walls for you bozos tonight, so show a little respect.” 

“Of course we’re glad you came. It’s really nice to see you, Gilbert,” Annie said, stricken. 

Troy looked up from Sam’s shoulder, wiping his eyes. “I dunno, man, I think it’s weird. I’m just used to you standing over us for hours and breathing. It helps me fall back asleep if I wake up in the night.” 

Abed blinked. It took a second. “I think it’s cool to see you now that you’re not trying to kill us.” 

Gilbert blinked back. “I don’t stay in the walls all the time,” he said, softly and vaguely in Sam’s direction. “And ‘kill’ is a strong word.” 

“You know what, you don’t even have to explain it to me, man,” said Sam, who’d found himself nodding along a little with Troy and thinking of Bucky. 

“And after a lifetime of deceit and persecution, we’re done!” Pierce was gesticulating with his free arm and looking crazed again. “I had to drag Gilbert here by threatening to backslide on the progress he’s made toward getting me to turn off the security cameras in my bedroom when I have guests over, damnit, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. We’re brothers and we won’t pretend to be casual acquaintances so you freaks can look like you’re capable of normal relationships!” 

Jeff turned toward Sam, spine stiff and elbows locked in place. “That scheme sounds insane when Pierce says it.” 

“Yeah?” It occurred to Sam that he still had an arm around Troy, which was maybe undercutting his incredulous tone. He decided it was too late to move his arm or change his tone. “It sounded solid before? _Having a scheme_ sounded solid before? You know lots of people don’t have war room meetings with their whole crew in order to make one extra friend.” He had a feeling he didn’t want the answer to this question, but he posed it anyway. “Why did you need another friend? God damn it, are you trying to get into the supervillain game? Let me tell you right now, I can definitely take you in a fight if this is a kidnapping plot, I don’t care you’re seven feet high.” 

“Well.” Jeff cleared his throat. “Put a pin in that, we can come back to how tall and good-looking I am later. The thing is, certain allegations were leveled against us recently. Also less recently. It’s a recurring problem. Insular, codependent, ‘mean girls,’ borderline incestuous…” 

“Please stop giving me examples.”

“I can see now that I should never have started. Anyway, we don’t have a great track record with trying to expand our group, either. Because we are, in fact, insular, codependent, and borderline incestuous.” He chewed on something for a second and failed to suppress it. “If anyone’s a mean girl, it’s Shirley! I am an _attorney at law._ ”

“’Mean girl’ was actually just you, huh?” 

“But we like you,” Jeff snapped, glaring. It was among the less convincing times anyone had told Sam they liked him. “All of us like you. The odds of that happening aren’t great.” 

It was just as well he still had Troy in his arms. He was thinking it was Troy’s turn to return the favor, and Sam’d just give up and collapse onto him. “So just to be real clear, what happened here was you all joined this project and evicted every member you didn’t like, like some kind of parasite taking over a host body.” 

“ _Nooo,_ ” Shirley and Annie said in unison. It was a drawn-out vowel of uncertainty. 

“Yes,” Abed said, at the same time. 

“Pigeons,” Jeff said desperately, “are a lot like the vegetables on the table at a wholesome family dinner—”

Natasha took pity before Sam lost his dwindling patience. “I’d like to interject,” she said. “Hi, Abed. Thanks for the invitation.” 

“Hey.” Abed waved minutely. “Thanks for getting us the Inspector Spacetime-equipped room.” 

She slid her hand into the crook of Sam’s elbow. “You decided to add someone to your group in order to prove you could be relatively normal.” 

“We should have known better,” Annie fretted. 

“Me especially.” Shirley was giving Annie a run for her money in the mournful Disney eyes department. “I’ve tried to make my family match up to some picture of how we’re supposed to look, and I know it doesn’t end well.” 

“In our defense, we didn’t think you’d find out because when we do this it founders within days,” Britta said. “I mean, usually we’d have kicked you out weeks ago because you said something mean to Abed, or slept with me and told me something horrible about yourself, or couldn’t take… Pierce.” 

Pierce beamed, as if he’d been paid a compliment, and said, “I’ve revised my position on Pinot noir.” He winked at Sam. 

“Ignore him!” Jeff spread his arms. “There’s no way you can walk away from Abed and Shirley. And, hear me out… We’re willing to gag Pierce.” 

“I do have all the accessories,” Pierce agreed, and then, “Wait, what?” 

“I don’t think you need to take any extreme measures.” Natasha squeezed Sam’s arm. “It sounds like you all have something very important in common. Don’t you, Sam?” 

Sam groaned and claimed the Victorian excuse for furniture for their party of three. It was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked, especially with Troy virtually in his lap. Which was worth it, but still. 

“That’s why you joined.” Abed’s face underwent an entire dawn and sunrise. “That makes sense. It’s exactly as misguided as our motivation, which narratively justifies rewarding our behavior when we win you over.” 

“Oh, that’s nice,” Shirley said, apparently content that if Abed had worked it out, it was a done deal. 

Her logic wasn’t terrible. Abed was especially adorable when he felt he’d solved out a problem. The killer was, Natasha was making almost exactly the same expression. 

Sam tipped back into the corner of the couch. Shirley and Annie batted their eyelashes, identically contrite and identically merciless. Troy, fully recovered, patted Sam’s thigh. “Welcome to the group.” 

“Yeah…” Sam pulled his phone out. This twisted contraption couldn’t have gotten any comfier with the change in position, but somehow, Sam felt better about it. A lot of his weight was on Troy now. “Who wants to tell Steve and Bucky they might as well come over?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've played yet more merry havoc with Sam's various comic backstories, but... that great big mostly-blank canvas that is the MCU. 
> 
> Pigeon facts continue to come from [Superdove](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3335602), and from Andrew Blechman's entertaining [Pigeons](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207324). 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed, & comment should it strike your fancy~!


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